Toy cleared his throat before he spoke again. He spit up an impressive gob on the lawn. Headlights went across Harley Wynn?s eyes, then over his own.
?Berryman wants a reason,? he said. ?He wants to know exactly why you?re offering all this money.?
Toy cautioned Harley Wynn with his finger before he let him answer. ?Don?t fuck with me.?
?I haven?t been fucking with you,? Wynn said. ?I understand the seriousness of this. The precautions ? Infact, that?s the explanation you want ? There can be no suspicions after this thing is over with. No loose ends. This isn?t a simple matter of killing Horn. My people are vulnerable to suspicion. They want no questions asked of them afterward.?
Ben Toy smiled at the lawyer?s answer. He slid over closer to Wynn. He put his arm around the pin-striped suit. This was where he earned all his pay.
?Then I think we?ve had enough Looney Tunes for tonight,? he said in a soft, Texas drawl. ?You owe us half of our money as of right now. You have the money inside your jacket.?
Wynn tried to pull away, ?I was told I?d get to talk with Berryman himself,? he protested.
?You just give me the money you?re supposed to have,? Toy said. ?The money or I leave. No more talk.?
The southern man hesitated, but he finally took out the brown envelope. The contact was completed.
Ben Toy walked away with fifty thousand dollars stuffed around his dungarees. He was feeling very good about himself.
Over his head the City Hall clock sounded like it was floating in the sky.
Inside the pub window Thomas Berryman was clicking off important photographs of Harley John Wynn.
The Thomas Berryman Number had begun.
New York City, June 12
Six days after the first exchange of money, a white pigeon walked down Central Park South in New York City, stopped to taste a soggy wad of Kleenex, then flew up to the granite ledge surrounding the windows of Thomas Berryman?s apartment.
Berryman says there are always pathetic city pigeons perched on his ledge. And that they?ll never look in at him or anyone else.
There are also long cigarillo ends all over the ledge.
And there?s an old Texarkana trick of burning off bird feathers with cigars.
The window is up ten stories over Central Park South. The building is picturesque, a dark, towering graystone hotel.
A famous fascist banker once killed himself out of one of the nearby floor-to-ceiling windows. He tied a rope to a radiator, jumped, hanged himself.
Because his neck is thick and his hair so black, Berryman looks fierce from the back. Face-on it?s different. People trust him right away. Nearly everyone does.
Thomas Berryman says he?s a hard worker, a brooder when it comes to work. He says he?d read all of Charles Dickens by the time he was fourteen, but that he just did it to accomplish a task.
He?s a broad-shouldered man, with beautiful woolly hair, and a seemingly darker, bushy, Civil War mustache.
His look reminded me of Irish football players, or at least my limited sports-desk experience with their pictures. Also, he would be right for Tiparillo cigar ads.
On this particular June morning, he flicked on a Carousel projector?s fan and tugged on a customary wake-up cigar.
He pulled curtains on a full wall of glass, and Central Park?s lollipop trees and hansom cabs disappeared. The Plaza Hotel disappeared.
One lazy-bodied horse in a blue straw hat disappeared last and caused Berryman to laugh. He hadn?t worked for four months. He?d played in the sun at MazatlAn and Caneel Bay. He was fresh as a rose.
Thomas Berryman sometimes spoke of his individual jobs as numbers. He would talk about getting ready for another little number; about having performed a number. In that respect, this would be the Horn number.
For the next three days he arduously prepared for his meeting with Jimmie Lee Horn. He read everything ever written about Horn, and everything Horn himself had written. He read everything that was available, twice. Until his eyes began to hurt. Until his brain wore raw.
Sitting in his cramped library, he was thorough as an archbishop?s secretary, wore no cowboy boots, wore high-priced cologne, read Larry McMurtry books to relax. Thomas Berryman?s
was to
and then
some more.
Life with Berryman had been good to Ben Toy.
He lived in a six-hundred-and-ninety-five-dollar-a-month penthouse. He owned and occasionally operated the Flower & Toy Shop on East 89th Street in Yorkville. The tiny florist shop was his hobby. Something he felt made him more than just a wiseass cowboy with a few dollars to throw around in bars.
One afternoon as he was locking up the shop?his free arm was holding a leather satchel; his cigarette was tilted up at a rakish angle?he was very suddenly drained of every ounce of cool, or bourgeois chic, or whatever it is
